Critical Linking: March 1, 2014

Almost two decades after publishing his last Calvin & Hobbes comic strip, elusive cartoonist Bill Watterson is back — with a film poster. The documentary, Stripped, is a self-described “love letter to comic strips” that includes interviews with, among others, Jeff Keane of Family Circus, Richard Thompson of Cul de Sac and Watterson himself.

According to NPR, some of the residents of Kern County, Calif. objected to the book. Kern County is where the Joad family ends up at the end of the novel, and the board of supervisors in the county believed the book downplayed the aid Kern County was trying to give migrant workers. One member of the board called the novel a “libel and lie,” according to NPR. One farmer named W.B. Camp said it was “obscene in the extreme.”

Lynn Shepherd applauded Rowling for her success as a children’s book writer, but believes that her career transition into adult fiction, such as 2012’s The Casual Vacancy and her crime fiction under pseudonym Robert Gailbraith, is making it harder for aspiring writers to attract the attentions of critics and readers.